


Stepping out with a heavy heart

by Chiomi



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Breakfast, Multi, Nogitsune Allison, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-20
Updated: 2014-08-20
Packaged: 2018-02-13 23:02:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2168586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chiomi/pseuds/Chiomi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can be turned by a scratch, if it goes deep enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stepping out with a heavy heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [verity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/verity/gifts).



> Thanks to Tristan for the beta! Verity, I really hope you like it.

You can be turned by a scratch, if it goes deep enough.

The nogitsune taunts her with that, with knives that appear and disappear from its sleeves, the claws of an animal that doesn’t readily change its shape.

It has a long time to taunt her. She’s healing inexorably but still human-slow, and the embalming process had been thorough. As her flesh knits slowly together, she wishes she could warn her friends. It may not be all that relevant in the end, because even healing, even healed, she’ll be stuck under six feet of dirt. She’ll probably just die all over again, suffocating in the dark.

It’s becoming a very real concern. When Allison is healed, her first breath draws in smoke, or a fly, or death given form: it’s dark and choking, and feels like the end of something. She feels her face stretch into a smile, and knows herself for nogitsune, and throws open the coffin.

There’s an open pit above her, and a backhoe, and Lydia gripping the controls with a manicured hand. “Took you long enough,” she says, and then her lip trembles, and Allison’s just catapulting herself over to wrap her in a hug, because nothing else matters in the moment.

When the emotion recedes enough for both of them to breathe, Allison finds herself sinking beneath her skin, and something that’s not her smiles. “Is everyone still alive?”

Lydia presses her lips together. “Your dad renounced your code. Aiden died. Everyone we like’s alive.”

“I probably shouldn’t go home, then, since I’m some kind of monster.” The words fall out easily, even though Allison feels like she’s been ripped open again.

Lydia pauses, then nods, artful tendril of loose hair bobbing in agreement. “I’ll take you to Derek’s. He and his girlfriend can put you up for a few days.”

Allison pauses, and she’s not sure if the comment comes from her or her new darkness, but she asks, “We’ve checked she’s not a psychopathic murderer, right?”

Lydia laughs, a little hysterical, and her nails dig into Allison’s arm. “It’s so good to have you back.”

Her car’s parked just outside the cemetery, and she’s got a spare sheet in there for Allison to sit on. Allison’s clothes are polyester, and mostly intact, and cleaner than they’d have been if she had to crawl through all that dirt herself, but they’ve got embalming fluid dried into them, and stink of months unwashed.

-

Braeden moves more like a predator than Derek does, and Derek’s gone all soft in the last - since she’d last seen him. He wears sweaters now, and a jacket that looks like it could belong to her dad. “Yeah,” he says in his soft voice, wonder in his eyes. “We’d be happy to have you. You can have Isaac’s old room.”

“Thank you.”

“Right,” Lydia says, squeezing Allison’s fingers. “I hate to resurrect and run, but I need to round up some manual labor to make your grave look undisturbed before someone calls the police.”

Allison doesn’t point out that - whatever, it doesn’t matter, maybe Lydia’s the one who dragged her back after all, with a banshee’s purview of death. Something in her laughs at the thought. She doesn’t have time for it, though, not when Derek’s still looking at her awed and Braeden’s leaning over a suitcase on the floor. She brings out a mess of fabric and says, “You need a shower.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

Derek seems to snap out of it, and gestures at the stairs. “On the left. Just use whatever towel.” His face twitches, like he’s regretting saying that, but he doesn’t look away.

Showering is a relief, both in that it’s the first time she’s felt clean in months and it allows her to catalog herself. She has no scars, not even the calluses she’d earned on her hands or the shiny spots on her knees from all the times she’d skinned them as a kid. Noshiko is hundreds of years old, she reminds herself. Maybe - maybe she can just take the healing, and try not to do the whole feasting-on-chaos thing.

The thought tastes of denial, because order and calm have never been her center, even before werewolves.

She dries off with a towel that smells clean to a human nose and puts on Braeden’s clothes.

When she leaves the bathroom in a swirl of moist air hardly warm enough to steam, Braeden’s just hitting the top of the stairs, a stack of linens in her hands. “Come on, let’s get you set up.”

Braeden helps her make the bed, dawn streaming through the blinds. The scars on her neck are still violent, and Allison tries not to stare at them. It feels very strange to be on the wrong side of scarred, the wrong side of human. The sheets are white, soft cotton, and it looks like they’re putting together some kind of sanctuary. “Derek’s making breakfast,” Braeden says. “Waffles.”

Allison doesn’t know what to say. They can’t be happy, being up at dawn to help a stranger and a former enemy. She tucks in the top sheet, and the words slip out, “Have you killed people?”

The quality of silence from downstairs changes.

Braeden smiles, and it moves the way her scars sit over her jaw. “Only for money, and never ones I liked.”

A hot-cold knot writhes in Allison’s stomach, because with Gerard, she’d -. She stays quiet while they put on the pillow-cases, and wonders how they talked about her when she was dead.

Braeden pats the pillow into place and puts her hand on Allison’s shoulder. “There’s blackberry syrup, too.”

“You like Derek, right?”

Braeden turns enough to raise an eyebrow at her and squeezes her shoulder. “Obviously.”

Downstairs, Derek’s plucking waffles from the iron, not even flinching at the temperature. He glances at them, and smiles in a way Allison wasn’t even sure he _could_. Her heart beats oddly, trips over itself in surprise. “Breakfast smells delicious.”

“It’ll taste even better,” Braeden says, smiling back at Derek with transparent pride and fondness.

Allison envies them intensely, even more so as they pass plates and serve coffee and orange juice wordlessly, like they were built to work in tandem. She tries to make herself envy them less as she puts butter and syrup on her waffle. Derek deserves to be happy, and Braeden looks like she’s making him happy and isn’t likely to burn his life down again. She can be happy for them. She’s lonely, yeah, but if she went to France - okay, Isaac left the continent to escape her memory, and that wasn’t - She can’t see herself cooking with Isaac, can’t picture him comfortable in her space. It wasn’t like the easy way these two have, like it’s not even hard to be gentle. She envies them their domesticity, and also their excellent waffles. “Wow, this is really good.”

Derek smiles down at his plate, and it’s kind of magical and makes him look years younger. Braeden just smugly says, “Told you.”

Allison eats five of the massive waffles, drinks two big glasses of orange juice. Not having eaten anything in months has given her an appetite, and she doesn’t put down her knife and fork until her stomach’s groaning protestingly. It gives sharp contrast to the part of her that’s still hungry, that will probably always be hungry, if she’s in control.

Derek nudges her leg with his knee. “You’re on dish duty.”

She nods, content, and levers herself upright. There’s dishes already in the sink; a big mixing bowl, and measuring cup, some spoons, a cutting board. She moves them to the counter to get at the plug, and cuts herself on the knife hiding at the bottom. The zinging pain of citrus in the cut is almost as shocking as watching it knit together, leaving just beaded blood on her finger. She feels less hungry.

Derek’s next to her like a shot. “I smelled blood.”

“Yeah - I. It healed, it’s fine.”

He looks over her shoulder at Braeden. Allison can feel her ease closer, within knife distance. Allison stays very still. “You came back different, didn’t you?”

She nods her head jerkily, abruptly at the end of her rope. Derek brings his hand up and brushes his thumb against her knuckles. “It’ll be okay. We’ll help you, if you need it.”

She laughs, and it comes out high and broken. Braeden presses fully against her and wraps her arms around her, and has no weapons in the hands she wraps around Allison’s stomach. The lack of weapon is more disconcerting than the fact of the hug itself. Before she’d died, they’d been in such crises all the time that any unexpected blood, even in a familiar place, would have had her grabbing her ring daggers.

She doesn’t have her daggers or her bow now, and feels abruptly naked for it.

Derek takes her hand where it’s shaking, and laces their fingers together, looking at them like he’s assessing how it works together. The breadth of possibility, of what’s on offer, hits her like a punch to the solar plexus, and Derek meets her eyes. He’d have heard her heart, of course.

“We should finish the dishes,” Braeden says quietly, right in Allison’s ear. “The syrup’s going to stick everything together.”

Derek’s eyes drop and the corner of his mouth quirks up. “Yeah. Then we should all get some sleep.”

He drops her hand, and Braeden lets her go, and brings in the syrup pitcher. Allison feels bereft of warmth at their absence, but does the dishes. It’s normal. It’s an anchor to the moment, to the reality of being free in the light and air.

When the table’s clear, Derek starts drying the dishes and putting them away. There aren’t a lot of them, so they’re done soon, and Allison wipes down the counter and the table. There are still three chairs at the table, and they feel like an unanswered question. Not demanding, and in no hurry, but unanswered nonetheless. Allison wonders if Lydia had this in mind when she proposed that Allison stay here. It doesn’t matter, she guesses.

Braeden’s already back in the big bed on the main floor. She wonders in passing why Derek’s not using one of the bedrooms, but it probably has to do with escape routes and the dead and she doesn’t want to think about it.

She’s surprisingly tired, ascending the stairs. Being alive is exhausting. She tucks herself into the cool clean sheets and drifts off like she’s weighed anchor in a storm.

-

The nogitsune is shaped like Stiles, now, rather than some dead soldier, but its eyes are Allison's. It sits on the bed of her room in the house her mother died in, and flips a knife idly between its fingers. “There’s a lot of pain in them. We could kill her slow and keep him for ages and ages.”

Allison sits crosslegged on the floor and thinks hard about the room where she’s currently asleep, until they’re surrounded in light streaming through gauzy curtains. “No. I’m already sharing with you. The two of us can share them with each other, too, and leave them alive.”

It frowns at her disapprovingly. “Young people are terrible.”

The scene changes again, dropping her at the nemeton. The nogitsune’s not in evidence, but the shadows are far from still. She settles in to a familiar nightmare, tethered by the knowledge that she’ll wake up to something better.


End file.
